Forums are becoming more and more popular on the internet every day. It seems that everyone at one point or another wants to develop an active popular forum, however this is a very difficult task. The main problem people come across is getting traffic to their forum. This article is designed to help webmasters get the basic idea of how to optimize their forum for SEO and achieve the best possible results. This will cover both primary keywords and long tail keywords. It should be noted that long tail keywords are the gold mine of forums.
Understanding the Issues with Forums
Forums out of the box are usually ready to go and easy to install. Within 30 minutes almost anyone with basic knowledge can get a forum up and running. The problem is most forums aren’t SEO friendly out the box and require either modifications or add-ons to improve their search engine optimization. Here lays another problem, figuring out exactly what needs to be changed. One of the big problems with forums is they don’t have good on-page optimization and with some forum suites very poor internal linking structures. Below I’ve listed some key areas that need to be addressed with every forum and from there you should be able to seek out a solution, add-on or modification to make the corrections required.
Unique Title Tags & Meta Descriptions
I’m still amazed that a lot of forums by default don’t include unique title tags or meta descriptions. However, this seems to be changing with many different forum sites as the years go by. However, some still lack some of the basic elements of proper title and meta tags. In theory, the most optimal title tag to use for a specific forum thread is the actual thread title. This is the thread title that the original poster uses when making the thread. The meta description should either be the actual thread message or if it’s too long, contain no meta description at all. Don’t worry Google will use snippets from the thread to create a proper description.
Proper Heading Tags
Another issue to be covered is using heading tags on your forum. The best way to correct this issue is to have the thread title appear on the main thread page within h1 heading tags. You can configure this manually with some CSS work and template corrections. In fact, with CSS you can change them to contain h1 tags and not even change the way they appear on the forum. As with any web page you want to use heading tags to structure content properly on your web pages, and in this case your forum pages.
Internal Linking
A lot of forums now give you the option to add some relevant threads below the current on-page thread; this is an excellent way to increase internal linking and help indexing overall. If this is a feature of your forum then you should enable it and if it doesn’t contain this feature just take a look around for a modification or add-on that can complete this task.
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